Posts Tagged ‘Nook’

In what surely is another nail in the coffin for printed comics, DC announced this week that they are making their entire catalog of comics available for Apple’s iBooks, Amazon Kindle and the Barnes and Noble Nook. This includes all DC Comics and Vertigo titles including Justice Leagues, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and more.

Check out the full press release from DC below. Time to start selling your closet full of print comics before it’s too late? Maybe.

DC Entertainment, the #1 comic book publisher in the U.S., announced today its entire line of periodical comic books are now available for download from the top three e-bookstores including Kindle Store, iBookstore and NOOK Store™. The precedent setting new digital availability brings bestselling DC Comics and Vertigo periodical titles, including JUSTICE LEAGUE, BATMAN, SUPERMAN, DETECTIVE COMICS, ACTION COMICS, BATGIRL, WONDER WOMAN, GREEN LANTERN, FABLES and AMERICAN VAMPIRE, among many others, to an even broader audience of digital readers.

In what will most likely amount to very little when competing with the dominance of the iPad and Kindle, Microsoft and Barnes & Noble today announced the formation of a new partnership. Said partnership will combine B&N’s Nook and College business into an as yet unmamed subsidiary with Microsoft investing $300 Million to help get it up and running.

“The formation of [this new subsidiary] and our relationship with Microsoft are important parts of our strategy to capitalize on the rapid growth of the NOOK business, and to solidify our position as a leader in the exploding market for digital content in the consumer and education segments,” said William Lynch, CEO of Barnes & Noble. “Microsoft’s investment in Newco, and our exciting collaboration to bring world-class digital reading technologies and content to the Windows platform and its hundreds of millions of users, will allow us to significantly expand the business.”

That sounds good. Snarky comment at the top of this post aside, as much as we like Apple and its products around here, a little competition is good for everyone — especially consumers. So, we wish Microsoft and B&N luck with their new Nook adventure.

For me details, check out Barnes & Noble’s full press release after the break.

Even though they seem to, at times, be mostly in the business of making their customers angry, Netflix is still one of the best places to get your movie and TV content from. In fact, their streaming service is one of the most popular available.

One of the ways Netflix is going to keep that service popular, and growing, is with updates to it and the applications that make it possible. That’s just what they’ve done this week with the user interface for their Android application.

The company explained that the revamped UI now displays twice as many movie and TV titles, with larger cover art, and that users can easily swipe through titles to find additional content.

“In the last 12 months we have seen a threefold increase in how long Netflix members are watching on their tablets,” Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt said. The company also said they wanted to introduce the redesigned UI in time for the release of Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet.

Netflix said the update will be available for iPad users “in a few weeks.” The update is free and is available now in the Android Market.

I don’t know about you but it seemed like I used to have several Barnes & Noble stores in my neighborhood and now I need to drive quite far to find one. Not that that really means anything. Amazon doesn’t have any stores at all and they’re doing pretty well.

The above only goes to illustrate that you don’t necessarily need a solid business model to launch a tablet these days. Heck, look at Motorola and RIM, they did it. So, if follows that Barnes & Noble, a company that already has eReaders and such like Amazon does, would try their hand at a full tablet as well.

In fact, they just announced one today. And, judging from the specs and the early word on the street, they seem to have done a pretty good job. The company took the wraps off of said Nook Tablet during a press event in New York City this morning. Here’s the major specs: